At my tenth birthday party, in a hilltop house outside Torino, I kissed my first girlfriend to a Simon & Garfunkel song. At fifty, on an island in the Mediterranean, I stopped looking for the woman who would complete me — and finally met myself.
 
So I Met a Hundred Women Before I Met Myself is a memoir about love, curiosity, and the long way home.
 
It begins with a boy who is born by accident, alone in a delivery room, and grows up asking why — why people connect, why some moments matter forever, why love feels like the answer until it doesn't. From a hilltop in Italy to a school in Switzerland, from Wall Street trading floors and Manhattan nightclubs in the 1980s to Paris, Moscow, Rio, and finally Ibiza, Giulio Cavallo retraces a life shaped by the women he met along the way.
 
There was the first kiss. The first heartbreak. The high-school sweetheart who left him for the boy who would become a Hollywood star. The Manhattan girlfriend whose family, he would only realize decades later, had been entwined with his father's in a political scandal that shook 1970s Italy. The encounter that turned into a near-disaster in Soviet-era Odessa. The love he believed was forever. And many more — close to a hundred, by his own private count, though counting was never the point.
 
This is not a book about conquests. It is a book about what a man finally sees when he stops trying to be loved and starts trying to be honest — about the quiet awakening that arrives when we stop looking for someone to complete us.
 
Written with warmth, candor, and the gentle humor of a man who has lived several lives in one, So I Met a Hundred Women Before I Met Myself is a coming-of-age story that arrives in late life. It is for readers who loved Patti Smith's Just Kids or Hemingway's A Moveable Feast — anyone drawn to memoirs that travel through real cities and real decades while quietly turning into something larger.
 
And the answer he was looking for was never an answer at all.